James Baldwin

Every afternoon, I enter the chaotic cafeteria of a middle school in Treme— a punch for a punch, a broken finger, broken jaw — nothing unusual. A hush, and the children huddle around plastic orange tables, quiet and upright.

“The system was never broken it was built this way,” read the hand-painted sign held by a woman in New York City’s Occupy Wall Street protest. The woman was not on Wall Street itself; she was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in what became one of the largest arrests of nonviolent protesters in United States history.